


It Makes Me Think of Manly Love

by hellhoundtheory



Series: Leaves of Grass [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, English, High School, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-08-10
Packaged: 2018-02-12 15:29:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2115114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellhoundtheory/pseuds/hellhoundtheory
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Tony Stark, English teacher extraordinaire, is actually subtle (for once) in his attempts to kindle romance between his favorite students (not that he would admit to liking the punkass kids if pressed).</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Makes Me Think of Manly Love

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Walt Whitman’s Calamus- Leaves  
> Open this link before reading: https://www.google.com/search?q=calamus&client=firefox-a&hs=RRG&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=fflb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=xs_nU539DM-cyATohoDgAw&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAg  
> This is where all the quotes come from: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/liveoak.html

“That’s good, that’s really good, you’re thinking,” Their teacher—not Mister, not Tony, just Stark—tells a student who says that Whitman’s preoccupation with nature is directly related to the idea of manifest destiny and the nation expanding as it is naturally supposed to, a mandate from God.

“But what if I show you a calamus plant,” he says, and the entire class gives him a look of equal confusion and disgust—mostly because Stark is way too energetic for this hour in the day and because none of them have an ounce of sense when it comes to horticulture. Bucky thinks to himself, _It’s too early for this,_ and tucks his head into his arms and determines to take a nap.

The fact that he has to deal with Stark this early in the morning is something that screams of the school’s child neglect. He should start a petition.

“Oh Barnes!” Stark falsettos, forcing him to open his eyes and retreat from the safety of trying to sleep, “Good, you’re awake, now, tell me what this looks like.”

The English teacher is guzzling his second cup of coffee—that they’ve seen, at least—and a google image search is up on the projector that Stark had fashioned himself so that he could watch youtube videos with his classes.

There’s a plant, almost like a cat-tail but with a bunch of flowers or seeds lining the surface and branched leaves with bilateral symmetry like a tropical plant. 

“A plant?” He says, feeling just a little dumb with the look Stark gives him. 

Steve snickers from beside him and Stark turns on his friend, “You, fourth of July, what is it?” Stark had taken to calling Steve that when he had found out his birthday for the birthday calender. Now no one would forget Steve’s birthday and Steve always has a significant amount of ‘Happy Birthday’ posts on his facebook wall every Independence Day. 

“Sorry, I told my mom what we were reading and she spoiled it for me.” The teacher rolls his eyes. 

“Don’t say anything.” He says with an index finger pressed against his goatee. 

His best friend nods, chuckling, “Got it.” 

Bucky looks around the room. Everyone else is at least as confused as he feels. 

Stark sighs, and rolls his eyes, flipping through his well-read copy of _Leaves of Grass,_ “Remember what I said about _Oh Captain, My Captain,_?” 

He begins reading with an annoyed huff, clearly regretting the random schedule generation that led to him teaching AP Literature with bedraggled seniors first period: 

“O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;  
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,  
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,  
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;  
Here Captain! dear father!  
The arm beneath your head!  
It is some dream that on the deck,  
You’ve fallen cold and dead.”

Bucky can’t help but smirk, wondering about how much Whitman wanted this guy to ‘rise up.’

 _Oh._ His eyes go wide and Stark is scanning the room when he catches the shock on his face.

“I see you! Don’t try to hide. You got it!” Mr. Stark’s pointing at him and Bucky can’t help but cover his face, willing the teacher to go away, to call on someone else. 

“Come on, tell me, what does the calamus plant look like. Whose arm is beneath the captain’s head? Why does Whitman ‘come joyfully’ with ‘the friend [he] loves lay sleeping by his side.’ You got it, shout it out.”

Bucky groans as people stare at him in confusion and Steve stifles his laughter under his palm. He finally snaps when Stark starts quoting more lewd lines, “It’s about dicks,” He groans, “Whitman has a boner for Lincoln.”

“Ding ding ding, we have a winner! What is the contextual evidence?”

“Well maybe everything you just quoted,” Bucky groans, knowing that he’s going to be tortured with Stark’s enthusiasm for literature until he reads and analyzes. 

“Come on, just read me a few lines, why is Whitman so unrepentantly homosexual in Calamus?”

He sighs and grumbles, finding the section that had stood out to him when he had read it the night before, reminding him of the time he and Steve had snuck out and spent the night by the lake back in middle school, drifting off to the lapping of the water against the rocks:

“And that night O you happy waters, I heard  
you beating the shores—But my heart  
beat happier than you—for he I love is  
returned and sleeping by my side,  
And that night in the stillness his face was  
inclined toward me while the moon's  
clear beams shone,  
And his arm lay lightly over my breast—And  
that night I was happy.”

But this is AP Literature. Giving Stark the quote isn’t enough and Stark’s going to drop his participation grade like a hot potato if he doesn’t analyze the damn thing, as the English teacher’s raised eyebrows and ‘go on’ nod indicate.

“He’s comparing his happiness to the happiness of the water ‘beating the shores’ which is also an innuendo, and he uses the rhythm of the water and his heart—and the enjambment of having ‘beat’ as a first word to emphasize it—to draw a comparison between him and the water. And the whole ‘he I love’ thing is a pretty clear allusion to homosexuality, especially after he says that they’re sleeping together. He’s even looking at the guy in the moonlight, which is a standard romantic trope.”

“Now was that so hard?” Stark smirks, and the rest of the class laughs at the innuendo, forgetting that Bucky just read and analyzed gay poetry. 

“Stevie boy, the lovely Sarah Rogers,” Stark was on good terms with most of his student’s parents, especially since he had had Steve as a student since freshman year, “May have already told you about Whitman’s proclivities, but how does that factor into the time period? Clearly this wasn’t accepted back in the mid-1800s.” 

Steve flips to a page he already had marked with a post-it, “Well, he’s got this bit here about being ‘alone, yearning and pensive’ and thinking that there are other men in a litany of other lands that he lists who are just like him, ‘speaking other dialects.’ He also says that if he knew them better he would love them in his own lands,” Steve says, all in all more concise and better at analysis than Bucky thought he had been. Steve had even listed a literary technique. 

“So basically Whitman’s poetry is grindr for the Civil War,” Stark finishes, “So! The question now remains, is his lover a real person or an idea?” 

The teacher goes onto talk about litany and enjambment and allusion all coming together to show that Whitman really loves America and dick and the bell rings before he can rope either Bucky or Steve into another uncomfortable analysis of homosexuality in the poet’s work. 

“Essay due next Wednesday on a theme in Whitman’s work and how he expresses it in his poetry. I’ll put a list of the assigned themes on the website. And there had better be evidence!” He shouts as Steve and Bucky escape the class with the rest of their classmates, both eternally grateful for their second period study.

Fifteen minutes later, Bucky is done with his calc homework and bored as hell, “Did you really talk to your mom about Walt Whitman?” Bucky asks while Steve chews a pencil, trying to draw a female form for his AP Studio Art class and utterly failing. They keep turning out too broad, too muscled with hard lines, and even too pockmarked from back acne, dubbed ‘bacne’ by the more clever teens. 

“Yeah. She asked me what we were reading. You know she loves poetry.”

Actually, Bucky hadn’t known that. But, then again, Sarah Rogers worked so often and so much that Bucky thought all she cared about was medicine and patient-care and properly organized charts, and Steve, of course. 

“Must be why Stark likes her so much.” Most of Steve’s teachers, in fact, had a good relationship with Sarah Rogers. Despite her busy schedule, she always came to October’s parent tour, where the parents would get to go around to their students’ classes and see what they did all day, spending fifteen minutes in each class on a tired Thursday night. The teachers also made a point to speak to parents of teens they knew may be at risk for bullying, and Steve had lived that life up until senior year, when people mostly stopped caring enough to do the ‘laughing with you but really laughing at you’ bullying that teenagers were so good at. 

The fact that Bucky’s was Steve’s only real friend—though he did have plenty of acquaintances who wouldn’t mind pairing up with him on a project or sitting with him in a class that Bucky wasn’t in—led to the teachers being heavily invested in Steve’s education and personal life. Not even the magnanimous Tony Stark was exempt from this universal teacher protection squad Steve had unwittingly acquired. When Bucky went through his ‘punk’ phase and started wearing black after coming back to school with shoulder length hair, the squad had closed ranks around Bucky as well, knowing all too well that Bucky’s fashion choices would make things harder for Steve too (when one of his teachers explained this, he cut his hair and went back to wearing non-black neutrals so quickly his mother grew suspicious).

But Steve remained utterly unaware of how he inspired teachers to get involved in his life as a student. He just thought that he got along well with adults.

“It must be,” Steve says, chewing on his pencil again with a frown, “But I’m better at analyzing prose for whatever reason. You did really good job with Whitman. You’ll probably get a five on the exam.”

Bucky shrugs off the compliment, “Nah, you used litany. Definitely trumps me awkwardly analyzing Whitman’s friend boner.”

Steve’s jaw tightens and Bucky doesn’t know whether it’s because of the phrase ‘friend boner’ or him not accepting Steve being overly kind to Bucky’s shoddy English work, “Buck, you used ‘enjambment,’ ‘allusion,’ and ‘innuendo,’ and explained exactly how Whitman used rhythm to create comparison while alluding to his homosexuality. You get eights on all of your essays and still pretend you’re bad at English. It’s not fooling anyone. Especially not college admissions officers.”

Bucky startles.

“You think I don’t know your commonapp password? Please,” Steve says, looking up from his work, “You’re applying UC Berkeley, Emerson, and NYU for your reaches. English and Education major. I know.”

“And where are you applying?” Bucky stutters, less angry at the invasion of privacy than he is at Steve sounding so damn _proud_ of him.

“Emerson has a pretty good Bachelor of Fine Arts program. And I’ll probably qualify for good scholarships. MassArt too. California Institute of the Arts. Colombia.”

“Please tell me you’re applying to state schools too.” Bucky couldn’t bear it if Steve set his heart on one of those big schools and found he couldn’t pay for it. That’s why Bucky had applied to them too. Also, because his sister would be going just a few years after him and he couldn’t possibly take away any opportunity for her to follow her dreams. 

“Of course I am. Same as you.” Bucky let out a sigh of relief and let Steve return to his work, flipping open his copy of Whitman’s book after a minute of twiddling his thumbs, reading the last piece of Calamus-Leaves V that they didn’t get to analyze:

“I am indifferent to my own songs—I am to  
go with him I love, and he is to go  
with me,  
It is to be enough for each of us that we are  
together—We never separate again.”

He knows that once acceptance letters start coming in, he’s only got one option and it’s wherever Steve is.


End file.
